[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

thanks indeed! 🙂

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

[Rob] “What I do know is, 100 max will not do it..”

well – 2 things on this:

1. 100 is configurable, although basic hosting plans won’t let you configure that
2. 100 does not mean that any more than 100 people at a time and your site crashes – mysql will queue requests as best as possible, and properly-coded sites will make small quick queries, meaning that they will only be in for a few milliseconds at most. this means that thousands of people could be hitting your site at one time and it would still be fine…

you can also consider having your code use a persistant connection, meaning that the major overhead of opening a connection, verifying the connector and closing the connection only happens once – that saves a lot of time in larger sites as well…

bottom line is if you anticipate a large crowd, then by all means plan for that. get a dedicated server and a programmer who knows how to write that kind of site. certainly doable, though, and i would probably start with someone like verio – you will pay more, but they will be up and have the bandwidth to take it…

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

[Rob] “I need a cart that can handle 10 to 20 thousand shoppers at a time?”

before i pass any judgement – is this an existing traffic load that you know you will have or is it level of traffic that you’d like to have someday but that you will be growing into?

if that’s existing traffic that you know you’ll have, then you’re beyond the level of a simple isp – 2 things there will be your downfall in a simple hosting plan:

1. simultaneous db connections – mysql defaults to 100, and even products like oracle typically take a 1000 or so per db instance (although box speed and query type impact that number greatly). so with 20k people per minute, that’s a lot of sql connections. while they all don’t have a constant open connection to the db by any means, opening and closing db connections is an expensive process, so there is a decent chance for performance problems with your average hosting plan db offering (see below for more)

2. bandwidth – just raw numbers here, but let’s assume that each of your 20k visitors looks at 3 pages per minute. this is a random number, but let’s go with it – and let’s assume that each page has 25kb of uncached material that it contains – this means (and i’m using 1 hour a day just to assume that you won’t have 20k shoppers per minute every minute of every day):

– 75Kb * 20,000 requests per minute = 1,500,000Kb per minute of file transfer
– 1,500,000 * 60 * 1 * 30 = 2,700,000,000Kb per month
– 2,700,000,000Kb ~= 2,500Gb per month

and your average isp hosting plan will max out at around 500Gb in bandwidth per month offerings. so with that kind of traffic, you’d be talking a customized network.

—

so with these numbers in mind, mysql could certainly support this kind of traffic, but you’d have to have mirrored servers and load balancing and a very custom network and server setup to make it all happen…

but if those are numbers you are aspiring to, then certainly while you grow, mysql and your average hosting plan can work. search our archives for hosting solutions that we’ve recommended in the past, although if you want to grow to these type of numbers, a bigger place like verio might be a good bet for you…

hope that helps!

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

you could certainly get the basics of a few applications in a weekend (dreamweaver, photoshop for web graphics, etc.), although i don’t know a place specific to connecticut, unfortunately… :-/

but learning web design is not a crash course thing. we have had a lot of posts in here from video people who want to pick up web design, so search the archives for the thoughts we’ve posted throughout the years on this topic…but long story short, web design is usability design and it is not something you can pick up quickly – very different medium than video editing and while the 2 share some concepts, they have a lot less in common then you might think…

post back if you have any thoughts!

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

i’d really consider using pay pal – you can sell the footage as a single product via their site without any shopping cart software needed and very reasonable service charges…

if you have more questions about that, please feel free to write back!

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

looks nice! the only comment i have at this point is that by making all your page content into graphics, you are eliminating the ability for search engines to index your content, which means that you’ll really never get listed anywhere for things like the tools you use or your client testimonials, etc. – those really should be in html so that the engines find them and it would also eliminate the problem of having 100kb+ images on your page – if i’m on dialup, i’m not waiting for that image to download… 🙁

worked ok for me here in safari, btw…

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

you can just skip the hub if you want….

https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.4/en/mh914.html

alternately, if you want to have a network, you can buy a router/hub (tons of these available for small networks – you plug the network connection into it and then all your boxes into it after that and it has a dhcp server, firewall, and router, which is all you need for a mini network…

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

you can force a download of an item by streaming it in a scripting language (like php) with a raw application/octet-stream mime type. otherwise, if you link to a file that the user’s computer knows about (like a .mov file), their browser will either play it inline or hand it along to the helper. in the case of the former, you won’t get the chance to save it to your desktop, but with the latter you will typically get a “do you want to open or save this file” dialog…

with a movie file, there is a good chance that it might play inline for some people. they can always right-click and say “save link as”, so you can either do the above php wrapper (if you have the scripting knowledge or urge to learn – it’s just a few lines of code) or you can just link to it directly (like “<A HREF=’/path/to/movie.mov’>”) and add the note on the page about potentially needing to right click (or control click on mac if you are still using a one-button mouse) to download…

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

no. unless there is something revealing in the network name…

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

your best bet is to look at other similar sites or some default design templates to get a feel for what colors go together – this site:

https://www.coolhomepages.com/

has both links to live sites and design templates that you can browse to get a feel for color combos that work well on the web…

hope that helps!

sitruc